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History of the Hekta
See also: The Hekta Turn 0 }|turn00| Long ago, in the time of legends, copper-skinned devils walked the skies, seeking out wizards and men of ambition willing to trade their souls away for power unimaginable. What happened to them is a matter of who you ask. Often, fabled heroes drove them out at the point of a sword or tricked them into leaving--for they were creatures of their word, these foreigners, and the chains of a bargain bound them till death. One thing was certain--the soul-traders, or "Hekta," as they had called themselves, had left the world and retreated out of the respectable leather-bound realm of recorded history and into the land of fancy. That was until, on a day just like any other, the Hekta came back as though nothing at all had ever changed--brandishing contracts written in long-dead tongues and enticing the weak-willed, the downtrodden, and of course, the wizards of the world. With them came their ghostly armies--the spirits of those who had bargained away immediate eternal rest in exchange for worldly power. The Hekta have returned, and, gods willing, the people of Aljaan will put them to the sword again, before it is too late. Chancellor Pradeep's people, the Hekta, were not devils, merely workers of a strange kind of magic that, historically, had made them very few friends. That her wizards could only work magic with the souls of others was not any fault of their own. Previous chancellors who governed from the great ziggurat city of Priraj had grown fearful and abandoned the outside world--outlawing the Old Way. But the world was changing in their absence, and the contracts that had been written millennia ago were about to expire, leaving the most-hated race of people in Aljaan without an army. The choice, to a practical woman like Pradeep, had been a simple one. Contact with the outside had to be made, and the revival of the Old Way was inevitable. The Hekta have returned, and, gods willing, the people of Aljaan will respect their sovereignty and leave them the hell alone. }} Turn 1 }|turn01| Because it was widely known that the true from of the shapeshifting god Brahamaputra was a dragon with thirty-three bull's heads, it was customary in the city of Hektaraj to not eat cattle unless the beast had committed a mortal sin. Because a beef cow was killed rather rarely, prices for the meat were steep. Dahrib Zalikman, a tailor, pushes through a throng of prospective buyers in Hektaraj's main market square, intent on getting choice cuts of some ill-mannered or sinful cow for his son's wedding. Ghostly guards stand at attention on the perimeter of the markets' tent cluster holding wispy, ethereal spears--sales for cattle had been known to get out of hand in the past. Zalikman heads to Radeem's stall. "Radeem my old friend," he says loudly, his arms wide with a grin on his face. "My son's wedding is in three days, and I have a modest sum to spend for the feast." "Dharib, you are a true friend and known throughout town as an honorable man. Here is what I will do. This bull here--he is a sinner, a brute. He gored a young girl in Pradeshi two days past--by my mother I swear it. I can give you the entire animal for three hundred dweri." "Three hundred!? You will ruin me, Radeem! What kind of mother raised you to swindle your friends in this way? Three hundred dweri? I tell you, I cannot pay more than one hundred." Radeem harrumphs and his thick brow furrows. "By the Sixty-six Horns of Brahamaputra!" he swears. "It would be a crime to give you this animal for less than three hundred." Over thirty or so minutes, a deal is worked out where Dharib will pay one hundred eighty dweri for the bull, as well as promising to tailor a silk dress for Radeem's wife. The tailor takes the bull to the appropriate temple to be slaughtered three days later, on the morning of the wedding. Thousands of such deals are worked out in the sprawling market of Hektaraj every day--the city where all was for sale. Children learned to barter, to curry favors and negotiate prices for small things, even at a very young age. Even the old wizards who once wove Contracts for foreigners were salesmen, in their very own way. income Hektaraj province 1-3 expand south 4 Results +14 (64+10-60), -13 (37+10-60), +49! (99!+10-60) -54 (6-60) At hazy dawn, when Dharib entered the temple with the bull, he found a line at the altar. He was anxious to butcher the beast. If he did not begin preparing for the feast soon, it would bear poorly on his son’s marriage. “Good attendant,” he said, holding out his hand to the man as he passed. “I know you, I believe. Your mother, she was of Pradeshi, no?” The attendant shook his head no, but shook Dharib’s hand anyways, taking the two dweri pinned to the man’s palm. “Perhaps you can help me with this bull. He is a sinner and is to be slaughtered. I am in a hurry, for my son is to be married today.” The attendant inspected the bull, stooping to look it over and under. He scowled and sneered at Dharib. “You would tell such a bold lie in Brahamputra’s own house?” he said. “Leave this temple, and take your heifer with you!” They pushed him out, followed by his cow and his two dweri. Mazed, he checked under the bull. It was, in fact, not a bull as such, lacking the particular parts required of such a station. Instead, it was blessed with udders. He felt silly for being mistaken on such a basic fact. Of course she was a heifer. That’s how he’d bought her, anyways. Filled with confidence, he found a proper enough temple in an old side street, and presented this, his sinful heifer, to be justly slaughtered. Again, they threw him out. When he gathered himself off the street, he checked again. The udders were gone, replaced, again, by bull parts. Dharib was filled with anger. As the sun rose higher, he dragged the beast across the city to a rundown old building, and without mentioning its unmentionables, he demanded the attendant slaughter the animal immediately. The animal remains at that temple. When the attendant brought his dagger upon its neck, the skin split, then the neck, then the head, forming two heads on each side of the blade. The two-headed cow has become an object of pilgrimage for devotees of Brahmaputra. It brings great and prosperous joy to all of Priraj. The marriage, however, was broken off. (The Sarovar Cow: +2 Culture, +2 Meta-Income in the province it resides in.) That’s the story, anyways. In whatever case, business is booming, and there are more sinners than ever in the animal kingdom. (+12 Income) {Your home province has reached a new level of development. Development difficulty there increases to 65.} Contracted spirits exit their worldly forms. They trickle into Priraj, and its ziggurats continue to fill. (Gain +20 Spirits 120/200) }} Turn 2 }|turn02| The God Dragon Sea that surrounded the domain of Hektaraj had once been the staging ground for a mythic battle—where the god Brahamaputra, incarnated as a mortal warrior, battled with the sky demon Lahati for sixty-six days and nights. The demon was no match for Lord Brahamaputra’s godly weapons: a chariot that could soar through clouds and was massive enough to hold a host of a hundred men, and Rireji—a thousand-barreled pistol that fired claps of thunder and has regrettably been lost to time. As a monk, Lapri Tansep had studied this story and others like it all his life. The pistol was a ceremonial weapon in Hektaraj—the nations’ ghostly armies had made firearms irrelevant for any real military use. Still, Lapri and other devotees of Brahamaputra used the seven-barreled pistol , as well as the long knife, as devotional tools of their unique and archaic martial art—Brahamuna. Lapri tightens his threadbare robe and stitched bullet sash and loads his pistol in a practiced ritual, mumbling a mantra up to lord Brahamaputra. Scraping the last of his bowl of dried oats clean with his wooden spoon, he walks outside his tent into the morning dark. Monks like him were always in some scouting mission or another, usually accompanied by a retinue of ghosts—spirits were very adept fighters but needed mortal taskmasters, and they were of course incapable of drawing maps of their own. Lapri stares at one of the wraiths standing guard around the camp’s perimeter. A helmeted swordsman from some completely alien culture, his shoulders draped in wispy phantom furs that curled into the morning mist. The spirit turned to look at the monk, and Lapri averted his gaze, afraid to look at the dull green throb of its eyes. He shudders. Why would the Almighty god deign to turn a man into such a creature? The circle of spirits turns inward, looking instinctively at the first monk who had awoken for some sort of instruction. Lapri rouses the other members of his order. This land is good, and there will be plenty to eat. The fruit was so plentiful here that it was falling off the trees. The exploratory group had already spotted a band of industrious nut and fruit gatherers here a few days back, content to hack it in the wilds for a few days to bring their spoils back to market (1-3 income, Priraj province. Use the +10 on my highest roll here). There were going to be more and more of them out here every year—the state might as well just incorporate the land and save itself the trouble years down the line (Free expo 4). Results +29, +15, -40, -53 Lapri stood atop a nearby hill with his chart before him. He looked around, finding features to mark. An exceptionally tall tree, there. The bend of a stream, there. Another hill, there, this one taller. It looked flat enough on top that he could survey from it. He held his instruments with care, going through the steps and postures of cartography. He found the angles, and he traced their lines, marking the next hill with an eye. A chain of such hills wound through this section of the territory. It would only take the measurement of one great distance to make sense of every line, to correlate his work and the work of others across the weald. A chill sunk into his elbow, and he jumped, tucking his brush away from the canvas. A spirit hung behind him. It was a lithe creature, an ancient man with long hair and a carved bone at his side. He was a fast one, one of Mitaura’s. It shook its head, an answer to a question Lapri had asked, one that had been carried in a chain all the way to Priraj and back. He nodded, sending it away. They wouldn’t condone an expansion until the land was fully surveyed. More gatherers ventured out every day in the best known places, forming little day camps of their own, but true settlement called for greater care. There was already talk of a city to be built here. He would continue his work to its completion. (+6 Income) Contracted spirits exit their worldly forms. They trickle into Priraj, and its ziggurats continue to fill. (Gain +20 Spirits 140/200) }} Turn 3 }|turn03| Chancellor Pradeep was a wide-faced, profanity-spouting, bull of a woman, her ears and nose bridge beaten into odd shapes over the course of her early boxing days. As she barreled down the stairs and into the basement of the dimly-lit storehouse, she waved her cane authoritatively—suppressed a toothy grin as monks and specters scrambled out of her way. The floorboards had been wrenched out down here, a group of men were toiling with shovels in a filthy hole. The five-foot-three woman came to a stop at the edge of the pit and, peering in, could see at least five coffin-sized crates of old and rotten wood being carefully unearthed. This put her in a very foul mood. “So it’s paperstone, then? Are we sure?” She asked to no one in particular. The head digger cracked open a crate with his shovel, revealing the long and silvery rods of metal that lay within. Pradeep grunted, shifted forward on her cane. It was as she feared. “Horns and hooves,” she swore, seemingly unconscious of the monks who were in the room. The misleadingly named paperstone was not a stone at all. It was a flaky, malleable metal that could not be mined anywhere in Hektaraj. It was famous for its fragility and for one other reason—a paperstone blade could injure or permanently “kill” that which was ethereal. In olden days, they said, before Brahamaputra had turned the skies black with his anger at the persecution of the Hekta, the metal was brought in by foreigners from lands far to the north—where it lay hidden in frigid black soil. Pradeep had been told the Ministry had confiscated all of it long ago—she had seen the guarded vaults under the ziggurat where it was kept. She had, evidently, been misinformed. “Who owned this warehouse?” she asked matter-of-factly. “It’s lain unused for several years,” a bearded bureaucrat stammered. “My office is working to find the title deed as we speak.” “I want whoever it is hauled to Pradeshi South for questioning. Don’t use ghosts, we can’t afford to lose any of them.” “Chancellor,” the Chief of Police said, “This cache could just be left over from the civil war.” Pradeep frowned at this. It would have been comforting to think this was just some forgotten postwar stash, but the crates were merely old—not centuries old. There was no telling who had hidden them there, but they couldn’t have had any good intentions. (1, 2, 3 develop culture and find out whodunnit, Priraj province). +++++++++ Meanwhile, Lapri was growing exasperated with the responsibilities that came with his expedition. The homesteaders out here didn’t appreciate being forced out of their land by armed monks, but the land allocated for the main ziggurat was being flattened at a good pace, and the first bricks would be laid in a few days (4, free expansion please). But there was plenty of administrative paperwork and runaround that, as head of the expedition, he was simultaneously unequipped and expected to deal with. He put himself at ease by allocating himself time to practice catas with a bayonet rifle in the evening. The rifle was not a weapon employed in his order’s art, but, the ever-curious Lapri had purchased a wooden dummy weapon with a barrel of solid iron, as well as rudimentary instructional scrolls, from the brothers at the Delwadi monastery. In his clearing he lunges and sidesteps with his practice gun in an elaborate dance, spearing and cutting open imaginary assailants from navel to neck, pausing occasionally to pop off a quick round. You could fire much less frequently with a single shot rifle than with a pistol, and as such the art was more physical, which excited him. He would save up his monthly stipend, he decided, until he could buy a real one on the cheap, along with actual bullets to practice his reloads with. Results 1!, -58, -54, -58 Hours after midnight, Chancellor Pradeep was roused from her sleep and whisked down to storehouse. Usually when one is roused or whisked, it is an unpleasant thing and cause for alarm, shouting, and asking (among other shouted questions) what these people think they are doing and who they think that they are. However Pradeep, after the rousing — and immediately preceding the whisking — found that with the sheer volume of attendants and porters and the crazy, horn-whittling fear that they all had in their eyes, there was at least double the cause for alarm and, to compensate, no time for questions. Her slipper touched something sticky and wet, and she tugged up the hem of her prize-fighter robe. As she took in the basement of the storehouse, her fists clenched around her robe. All of the guards, every one of the dozen left to guard the place, were here. The ones guarding in the front — even the nightman — had been dragged down, their throats slit and left in front of the excavation hole, overlooking the paperstone crates. That is, they would be overlooking them. They should be. They weren’t. And hanging over their absence was a wooden, hand-operated crane. The chief of police pulled her away from the edge. She stammered at him. “Where are the crates?” she said and, with a renewed sense of outrage, gritted her teeth. “Who do they think they are?” “Try to relax,” he said. “The ministry got here the same time we did. They’re handling things. It’s out of our hands. My hands, at least.” “Handling things?” “They took the paperstone. All five of them. They’re locking them away with the others. They’re safe.” “They’re-” Chancellor Pradeep mouthed: Five? The chief wasn’t looking at her. He shook his head. “It’s for the best,” he said. Pradeep stepped away from him. She cast her eyes around, tracing with mounting suspicion and horror the trails of blood that painted the floor, soaking into the smooth storehouse stone. There were the lines of dragged bodies, and cutting across them, lines from crates pushed or dragged through the other lines. No. Just one crate. The others had been loaded directly onto porting carts by the ministry. Just one had been dragged up and out, and then the crane had been dragged through its trail of blood. The sixth. “Have they found the title yet?” “Yeah,” the chief said. “Turns out the owner’s been dead for a decade, at least. We’re looking for any family now.” He turned his attention to a long bundle of cloth in his hands, holding it in front of him with easy caution. “The guys that did it left this,” the chief of police said. “I’m not sure what it means. A calling card, maybe? One of the murder weapons? Never seen anything quite like it.” He unwrapped it, revealing, in the folds, a dagger as long as his forearm and shaped in what could only be ceremonial imagery. Either that, or it was a stake to be driven into something, or a symbol of some order. More concretely, the blade was long — and a strangely bright silver, almost white. Paperstone. “We have to keep this quiet,” the Chancellor said. FUMBLE: The game is afoot. }} Turn 4 }|turn04| Valanius wished, nine hundred years after the fact, that he hadn’t traded his soul to bring his wife back from the grave. Now his specter stood guard over Marajidarj, the Amethyst King, and he still had a few more centuries in his contract. Valanius liked the king—the thin fellow would talk to him and tell him Hektan fables and old court stories. Marajidarj was a wispy-bearded and slight young man with a scholarly stoop who felt most at home in a one-sided conversation with a phantasm. Today, the Chancellor was visiting, and that never meant anything good. While Valanius liked the bookish monarch much more than the incorrigible Pradeep—the civil war had rendered the king a browbeaten relic shackled by an unforgiving constitution. All over something one of Marajidarj’s ancestors had done. Pradeep enters the king’s modestly-sized chamber and tosses some hard-boiled eggshells onto the carpet, barely breaking her stride. Truth be told, Pradeep liked the Amethyst King as well, even though she had once called him “a waste of a good pea coat.” But the Chancellery had an obligation to show the monarch who was boss whenever it saw fit. There conversation was terse and fairly brief. Pradeep wanted to know that the eyes of the chancellery, in the coming months, would be laser-focused on the monarchy. When she thundered out, the king turned to Valanius. “Something’s rattled her,” he says, and whether the king knows more than he lets on, Valanius has no idea. (1-4 develop CRACKDOWN my dude) Results -48, +35, -29, -36 A week later, the culprits were found working in a butchery. By accounts, one of them had a change of heart and turned them all in. They were summarily executed, like animals or war criminals, or criminal animals. Pradeep watched the first row of musketeers kneel, load, and take aim at the men with black hoods covering their faces. A month later, and she couldn’t recall their faces. Not a shard of paperstone had turned up since. It was a dead end. “Glad, that’s wrapped up,” the chief had said to her face. “Mighty funny. Don’t you think so, Chancellor?” Chancellor Pradeep’s eyes were fixed on nothing, trapped simultaneously in panic and calm. “Mighty funny,” she whispered. (Culture +2) No officers. No monks. None of the king’s men. Nobody who could possibly be connected. They had to be discreet. They had to be invisible. She met them at night in the alley behind her old boxing haunt. They reported to her, took a pittance for bread, then departed. One heard whispers at the deep end of the market. One heard private things over a wall of the King’s courtyards. One made the rounds at temples. Every time they came back with a morsel to chase (talk of “paper” in the market; a cart full of sickly cows being hauled to their graves; a strange name spoken in a hush), she set after it before the sun rose. When there was nothing, when it was all empty talk from them, she slipped in the back door and hit the bags. After weeks, she was almost back in form. (+1 Extra Action next turn.) }} Turn 5 }|turn05| Askraprareji, which literally meant “the Doom of Askael,” was the largest ship the state of Hektaraj had ever commissioned. A colossal golden bull’s head adorned its prow, its top and aft ballonets were plated in armor, and red and blue robed Delwadi brothers swarmed over the decks of the docked goliath like ants, adjusting the rigging and checking the air pressure before launch. Two slim, parallel decks, called “shot rails” hung from the underside of the ship—a cadre of twenty Delwadi monks could man each side and shoot continuous volleys with their famed long rifles. The ghosts hidden in the ballonets would take care of the harder targets. The ghosts controlled by the Hekta could walk on air for an endless amount of time but would always be drawn back to the grand ziggurat of Priraj when they got lost, which happened too frequently for Pradeep’s liking. Lantern ships were needed to house them and guide their way through the black skies—lantern ships crewed by hardy monks. Chancellor Pradeep was not devout, and had reservations about the ever-militaristic monasteries and their influence in the government. This ship had been a concession to them, one that she wasn’t eager to make again (1-2 dark sky travel tech) (3-4, continue my fucking expansion) Results 78(+18), 77(+17), 29(-31), 45(-15) The monk dozed half asleep at his desk, one of his horns resting on the knuckles of his fist. He jerked awake as footsteps stopped behind him. It was an older monk, his ringlet eyeglasses obscuring his eyes. “Brother Lapri, you weren’t at Asanas this morning,” the old monk said apologetically. “Did you know? We greet each day together in the yard with salutations. It’s quite corrective.” “Ah, no, Brother Amartya,” Lapri Tansep said, resisting the urge to yawn. “I have my own morning routine.” “Your own… routine?” This seemed to please the old monk. His eyes turned to slits behind his glasses, and he bowed until his chipped horns dipped dangerously close to Lapri’s scalp. “You must lead us one day, then,” Amartya said. “Tomorrow, at dawn. I insist.” He left without waiting for a response. Some other mission had taken hold of him, carrying him across the office floor crowded with monks and their ghost couriers. Lapri slumped back to his desk. Ever since the construction efforts began, he hadn’t slept right. The city was unnatural, so crowded and so loud. Even at the crack of dawn, its sounds and smells were a pollution compared to the gentle wind and fragrant air of the frontier. Even sitting at this desk, his senses were constantly besieged by office chatter and the clang of construction at the dock a few streets over. He’d begun planning his day around them, so that when he got back from his lunch break, the construction crew and most of the other monks were off on their breaks. Peace and quiet. He yawned down at the old sea charts crowding his desk. One came embalmed in a layer of what he guessed was glass, but by the occasional scorch mark it must have been bone hammered transparently thin, like the lanterns in the ziggurat. The rest of the charts, visibly young in comparison, were still centuries out of date. Age doesn’t usually mean much to a cartographer, but the seas have always changed faster than the land. Even with a reckoning or the ever elusive landmark, the currents change with the seasons and the years. Each chart was merely a suggestion, a pile of puzzle pieces that didn’t quite fit together. He almost had it. It was driving him mad, but he almost had a path through the deep. But his stomach was rumbling. And out of the corner of his eye, he spotted the old monk Amartya returning. Lapri escaped out the door, down onto the street. Chancellor Pradeep waited with the foreman and the chief of police, watching the sygyzy creep impatiently past high noon as the working men shuffled down from the scaffolds. Beneath the imposing hull of The Doom of Askael, the entire shipbuilding crew (which included a small cadre of monks with their swarm of ghosts) gathered around the loading stand. The foreman made a big show of looking upset: scratching at the base of his horns, pacing, side-eying at the chancellor, and so on. Pradeep ignored him. She stood loose, her shoulders slack as if draped over a turnbuckle. She scanned every inch of the ship, gripping a cold, metal shape in her pocket. The foreman tried to get her attention with a raised hand. “Chancellor,” he said. “I appreciate the situation-” “I don’t think you do,” the Chancellor said. The foreman grumbled. As the last men trickled into the crowd, the chief waved his officers in from the dock’s entrance, nodding at Chancellor Pradeep. “Is that everyone?” she said. “How should I know?” the foreman said. “I was supposed to be counting?” She and the chief exchanged worried looks. “If I could have everyone’s attention,” Pradeep said. “I don’t plan on taking up too much of your time, I know this is cutting into your lunch break.” “Which is a very important time of the day, Miss Chancellor,” the foreman said. “We’re on a very tight schedule-” “Which is why I want all of you to cooperate,” Pradeep said, shooting him a cold glare, “and this will all be over with time to spare. Right, chief?” “Alright,” the chief boomed. “Here’s what’s gonna happen. All we want is for all of you to answer a few basic questions. Who you are, where you’re from, your associations. It’s nothing serious, nobody’s in trouble, but it looks like some idiot courier lost a few very important pieces of record, so we’re just doing our due diligence. You all understand, this is a very important project.” As the police officers approached the stand, Pradeep waved two of them over. She turned to the foreman. “The lantern ship in the next dock,” she said. “If you don’t mind, we’d like a little tour.” Lapri held a few coins in his fingers, leaning against the stall and watching a cross-legged man toss fruit in some spice blend. “What is that?” “Fruit chaat.” Lapri held out the coins, and the man replaced them with a bowl of spiced apples, melons, and mango with a ladleful of chile chickpeas on the side. He lifted a bite to his mouth as he re-integrated with the moving market crowd. It was delicious, so sweet and so spicy. It was almost too much compared to daily oats, but this — the tastes, the smells, all the people chattering — this kind of overwhelming of the senses wasn’t so unwelcome. Despite being closer to the docks it wasn’t so noisesome. He ate a tingly spoonful of chickpeas. He could get used to the city. A metal shape pressed into his back. A lantern big enough to cage a bull hung from a great arm off the bow of the ship. The foreman pointed it out to the two officers and the chancellor. They didn’t seem interested. “The arm might look a little spindly,” he said, “but it’s quite sturdy, and the lantern itself is deceptively light. It doesn’t move at all in a high wind.” “That’s great,” Pradeep said. “Are the balloons supposed to be full?” They were full to bursting, decorated with the telltale signs of a ghostly presence. Their restraints buckled and popped, pulling taut as the ship creaked. Its hull pulled up off its chocks, gaining an inch of clearance before bouncing against the ground. Pradeep sped off for the gangplank, followed by both officers. They left the foreman dumbfounded, running up the stairs of the temporary dock. The gangplank tilted, its angle growing more and more dangerous. Pradeep lunged up it, crawling onto the lantern ship, an officer hopping up behind her. The end of the plank dragged away from the dock, falling away as the last officer leapt. They grabbed him by the horns, pulling him onto the ship’s deck with gritted teeth. Before they can get to their feet, a dozen long blades press in from all sides. The wielders are hooded and cloaked in flowing robes of orange. The blades are silvery-white. Paperstone. “Shall we kill them, Satguru,” one of the robes says. “Bring them up here,” says a man with a thick, city’s edge accent. The orange robes take them by the arms, dragging them up the stairs and dashing them on the poop deck. Beside them, a monk lays lashed to the side and gagged with an apple. His eyes widen at the sight of the chancellor. Pradeep feels the gun’s weight shift in her pocket. Beside the helmsman, an old man stands, his chest puffed up to the sky. His beard is full and puffy, and his horns curl above his orange turban. While the lantern ship ascends, he turns, grinning at the sight of Chancellor Pradeep. “Chancellor! I thought we would never meet,” he says. “Well I know you have to get back to your busy day, so I won’t waste any of your time. My children call me Satguru. I assume you are here about the paperstone.” Pradeep harrumphed, leaned forward on her cane and, feigning nonchalance and confidence, squared her shoulders. Her mind was working overtime. The men surrounding her—were they monastic in any way? She couldn’t recall any order that sported these particular uniforms, but there were over a hundred different monasteries in Priraj alone, and no one could be expected to remember all of them. Still, she had to assume these men, or some of them, were monastic, based solely on the ritualistic rings and charms that adorned their horns. That meant they were trained combatants, and that she was in a whole world of trouble. This Satguru character had her in a tight spot. Her eyes swiveled to where Lapri was bound. She wondered how they had gotten hold of him. It might be a trick, she realized. No one in the monasteries could be trusted, not now, at least. Not one person knew, especially not Pradeep, how many of these bulls were tied together at the tail. “Horns and hooves, Mister Satguru, you’ve certainly got my attention.” Pradeep said, and the swords of the thugs around her seemed to bristle at the profanity. They were devout, then. “What is it you lot are after?” Satguru was unfazed by her strong words. "What is every good raji after? To see our people endure. To see them grow strong. To see them ready when the wall of The Deep can no longer keep the world out," Satguru said. He paused. "That is too vague for you." He mused for a moment, tending to his beard. The ship pushed forward. The orange monks that lined the sides commanded unseen specters, and the ship passed neatly over the top of the roof, rising over the Priraji skyline. "We consider ourselves to be enlightened men, Chancellor, even amongst monks, and as such, we want precious little. I suppose you could say we have everything we need. We have strong, loyal men, with fire in their hearts. We have a good ship, capable of weathering the most vicious storms. We have a navigator." He pointed to Lapri with four fingers. The monk yelped, struggling against his rope bonds and coughing at the apple in his mouth. "The most knowledgable man in Priraj of the deep ocean, so I've been assured." He withdrew his hand, stepping forward, his jewelry bangling. Despite his looming figure, he is somber, almost pleadingly so. "And enough paperstone to arm a Skaelic legion," he said. "Miss Pradeep. I know you are not a religious woman. Surely you believe in Moria? That we will all return to her, in the end and the beginning?" "I do," she said. And she truly did. She believed in Brahamaputra as well, although to specify him as a thirty-three headed dragon had always struck her as a bit farfetched. But to be certain, she believed in the continual cycle of entropy and its inverse, and recognized Brahamaputra as the entropic force at the heart of the universe that drove death and destruction--that brought down the fire of Time from on high and delivered it to Al'jaan. The deck lurched, and her contemplation of the God Dragon was interrupted as she felt the weight of the gun in her pocket shift. How fitting. "You mean to take the ship, then?" She asked, somewhat bewildered. "Where will you go?" The ship changed heading, matching with the street as it picked up speed. Satguru pointed to the sparkling moon, letting his hand fall open below it toward their heading: due west. "Umbicaelus. The sea at the center of the world," he said. "There lies the center of the eclipse. And in exactly one year, the center of the next. Of that much, I am sure. "I am not a man of action by nature, Chancellor. But the future is so clear to me, as if it had happened many times before. I see interlopers from the deep. I see dark days, each darker than the one before. And I see our people, bickering. I cannot sit in quiet contemplation, waiting for our people to rise to the occassion when I know that there is something I must do." He signaled two orange monks at the stern. They each hefted a sack full of coins, tossing handfuls to the street below. Sounds of shock and panick spread in waves. Satguru beckoned, and another monk plucked one up, tossing it to Pradeep. She caught it, opening her hand cautiously. It was deceptively light. The coin bore only two images. One side was the figure-eight, a common symbol of the circle of time bending back upon itself. The other side, Pradeep didn't recognize. It was a spiral. She couldn't at once tell whether it was spiraling in or out. Of course, the coin was paperstone. "I have lost hope of seeing Moria again," Satguru said, distantly. "She is dead, as one day Baphomet too will be. That is what we fear, that we are living in a never ending cycle that never returns to the center. A further and further descent. A downward spiral into cold darkness." Pradeep saw madness in his eyes. Not a glint, but a deep, dark sheen. In a moment, he had gathered himself again, jangling his jewelry. "Don't misunderstand," he said. "We will not take you with us, and I have no intentions of killing you. After all, you have much work ahead of you. Much work." He grinned. There was still a glint there. "I'm afraid you'll be departing at the end of the street ahead. It has been an honor meeting you. We have just a little more time, but I have said my piece. One more question. Maybe two, if they're quick." As a boxer, Pradeep had always been quick to capitalize on her opponents’ lack of awareness. In a short second, Indira Pradeep’s cane clattered to the deck as the old woman whipped the gun out of her pocket with a speed that betrayed incredible forethought. Leveling the gun not at Satguru, but at the bound Lapri, she allowed herself a small smile. “Mister Satguru, it seems as though the tables have shifted a bit.” The monks moved in, but Satguru stopped them, realizing the nature of Pradeep’s gambit. “Mister Satguru, I’m not as learned as you. So tell me, what are the odds of your crew being able to pass through the deep sky without a capable navigator?” There was no curse, not in Hektan, not in Skaelic, not even in the Oglic tongue of pixies and apes, that sufficiently encapsulated Satguru’s hatred for this woman. “Oh you’ve made your proposal,” she said. “And I don’t like it. So here’s what I suggest. Double back around to the dock before I shoot Lapri’s brains out. You and your men will be arrested, but not executed. You have my word on that.” She beckoned to the dark storm clouds ahead. “Traveling there without Lapri is a death sentence—you know that as well as I do. “And in case you’re wondering if I wouldn’t shoot my own man—“ There was a sharp crack, and Lapri wrenched and wailed in his bonds, clutching at his bleeding knee. "Now Chancellor," Satguru said. "Let us consider our next actions very carefully." The two police officers rose to their feet, unsure of their standing in this situation. One pistol-shake from Pradeep, and Satguru motioned for one of the orange monks to hand them a knife. One of the officers fell to Lapri, hacking at the ropes holding him. Satguru let his right hand fall on the hilt of his sword. “Obviously, we both want very different things, but neither of us wants to see this ship plunging into the deep without a reliable heading. Yet if both of us decline to consider the alternatives, that is exactly where we are headed.” Beneath the folds of his robes, his left hand found rest on one of levers by the helm. “The deep is not a lock, and this man is not its key. It is a narrow and shifting path, and we are all willing to brave its dangers, no matter the consequences.” He gripped his sword-hilt, and his other hand gripped the lever. “Shall we all tempt fate, then? Chancellor?” Satguru squeezed the release, dropping to a knee with the lever in hand. The deck tilted, twisting upward as the ship groaned with the effort. Everyone on the poop deck staggered to find their footing. The orange monks were the most prepared, dropping to a knee as their leader did and grasping at the gunwales and rigging. Pradeep squeezed a couple shots into the aft ballonet, but the third went wide as she slipped, sliding on her back toward the stern. The officer untying Lapri tumbled, cracking his head on the rail before bouncing over. He fell past the upturned rudder, followed by the other officer, Pradeep's cane, a couple unlucky monks, and a terrified, half-bound Lapri. His ropes unspun around him, jerking him back and forth as false knot after false knot pulled apart. The ropes finally caught on his wrists, followed by a pop. He screamed, hanging from dislocated arms. More screams came from the cobblestone street below. It was close enough to hear the bodies hit. "You wish to be dropped off," Satguru shouted above the rising din of wind and screams. “I shall oblige you.” He and the helmsman evened out the rudder, easing into a sloping, high-sided turn. They were twisting away from the street, over the buildings as the city rotated by beneath them. Pradeep slid along the aft gunwales, trying to steady her pistol. Lapri swung out to port, screaming incoherently. "Bayaalees, Terah, get him up!" Satguru shouted. Two monks climbed down from the rigging, digging themselves in as they pulled Lapri up hand over hand. His wrists were starting to slip through the restraints, and he was nodding off from the pain. Orange monks were climbing along the rigging toward her. She sat poised at the port-aft corner, pinned in with her good leg and with one arm draped over the side like the turnbuckle. Her breath tasted like iron, and her head buzzed with nervous energy. The aft ballonet was still intact, two bullets barely enough to start a limping leak. A few more in the right spot might cause a real problem, but it could also bring down the entire ship, nosediving into the city in a pile of wood, paperstone, and bodies, including hers and Lapri's own. Lapri. The arc they were on brought him against the stern, dragging and banging him up the side. He was so close she could nearly touch him, and red rings were wearing up his hands as the rope migrated further away from his wrists. Down below, out of the corner of her eye, the city gave way to rushing brown water. Were they that far from the city center? The river was deep here, but its surface was too quick to skip stones across. Pradeep could almost feel the stones leaving the end of her little fingers, plunging into the water without even a splash. Satguru toed toward her across the poop deck, his sword drawn. "I take no pleasure in this, Chancellor! No pleasure at all!" he shouted. "We are both servants of the public. I only wish you understood." He shouted this with a slow grin on his face and wild in his eyes. "Devils," Pradeep swore, "devils, all of you." Clinging to the pistol like it was her last lifeline on this earth, she eyed Lapri and the river below. Could it be survived? They were not that far above the water, but the rushing current was the real threat here. Satguru edged closer and closer, curved sword extended, bending his knees with each mad sweep of the poop deck in a way that told the Chancellor that this was not his first time on a skyship. Lapri first. Pradeep slithered her old and wounded body along the rigging, reaching the place where the hapless monk lay dangling precariously by his wrists. A quick round to the chest, and the orange-robed goon who was moving in on Lapri suddenly tumbled off the rigging and into the wide sky, legs and arms in a tangle. "Lucky," Pradeep mumbled to no one in particular. "Lucky old bat." Lapri had only a few more seconds before his hands lost their grip on the ropes. A rifle shot embedded a neat hole in the red wood of the jigger mast near the Chancellor's head, spraying fine wood pulp everywhere. A marksman in the mizzen rigging, most likely. "Never meant..." she said, loosing one of Lapri's hands and taking it in her own, "Never meant... to give you time to load that thing..." Satguru was closer than she realized, and she rolled to the underside of the ropes to avoid his blade, hanging like a child from the monkey bars. Lapri let go, plummeting into the river. "I'm with him," Pradeep said, and as the heel of Satguru's boot came down on her grasping fingers, she popped off one last pistol shot through the ratlines, aiming at the mad monk's turbaned head. Whether it connected or not, she has no idea, for it is scarcely a second later that she impacted the water, and her world went brown. Indira Pradeep woke gasping. The last thing she remembered was tumbling through rapid water and the flash of a rocky river bed. Now, she reclined on white sheets in the evening sun, her back propped up by pillows. Her leg, the one she broke back in the day, it stung like hell to move. Besides that, she felt fine. The sun out the window was setting in front of the moon. "You're awake." A monk in a chair inched forward, his feet pulling him along on tiny wheels affixed to the chair legs. His arms were bound in two slings, resting on his chest. Pradeep's eyes narrowed. They were alone. "Lapri Tansep," she said. "I'm not in the mood for visitors." "Sorry, I'll see myself out," he said. "I just... wanted to thank the woman who saved my life. Their ship's gone. Sailed straight through the horizon. If it wasn't for you, I'd be lashed to the mast right now, or worse, so.... Thank you." She stared him down. He nodded, turning meekly toward the door. Each movement was painfully slow, and by the time he was half-turned, his chest heaved with the effort. One leg had a bandage strapped around it concealing Pradeep's bullet wound, and every time he lifted that leg, he grit his teeth. "How's the leg?" she said. Lapri stopped, gathering his breath. "The bullet went all the way through," he said. "Arms will be fine, too, once the swelling goes down." He wiggled his fingers, wincing. "There's been a general uproar since you've been out, with everything that's happened today. First, there was the business on the ship. The chief already gave a statement to the public. Luckily, one of your officers survived the fall, because he wouldn't believe anything I said. They called themselves the Monks of Meghna, I think." He looked out the window. "And then there was the next business. The king had a public address about that, but I don't think anyone listened to him. It is eerie, though. It makes me think Satguru wasn't as mad as he let on." "What are you talking about?" Pradeep said. "What business?" Lapri took a deep breath. "You'll want to be sitting back for this." Hekta have reclaimed their knowledge of The Deep and therefore the capability to sail through it with a much greater chance of success. ziggurats are full of spirits (200/200). The excess escape, wandering to the places all spirits wander to. }} Turn 6 }|turn06| Pradeep had already garnered a reputation as a pugnacious and popular Chancellor, but after the hijacking, the letters of goodwill and support poured in. The Legislature, ineffectual as it was, passed a resolution condemning "religious violence." Even the monarch Marajiraj had graced her bedside. He had brought her a flowering orange tree for her private garden--one of Indira's small concessions to femininity. Pradeep was somewhat discomforted that this transformative event confirmed what she had long suspected--she indeed liked the young fool. A friendship between the two of them would prove problematic politically. For now though, she would put off that eventuality. A different sort of person would have been rattled by an attempt on their life, but Pradeep rose reflexively, almost self-destructively, to meet any challenge to her authority. Archaic religious teachings among the Hekta taught that religion and warfare was the male realm, and that women were masters of the worldy--politics, the sciences, and industry. By a purely classical sense, Indira Pradeep was an exemplary Hektan woman: stern, grudgingly maternal, and perhaps mildly sociopathic. It wasn't long before she was out of bed, her cane no longer a folksy prop but a genuine mark of authenticity. Duties in the Chancellory resumed at their usual pace, and Pradeep was insistent that the lantern fleet be brought up to tip-top shape (1-2, research even BETTER deep sky tech, add my +10 to the higher roll please). For the span of Lapri Tansep's recovery, administration of the prospective city was delegated to a new bureaucrat (3-4, give me my damn expansion I'm not Timea-ing this game).Pradeep had seen enough to realize that the monasteries were likely tied into whatever was going on, and that they would need to be extricated from the political sphere in what was sure to be a slow, excruciating, headache of a process. One for her successor, hopefully. Results -39, +9, 0?, -29 It was customary in the city of Hektaraj not to eat cattle unless the beast had committed a mortal sin. This was not because cows, like Hektans, have a pair of horns on their head, as some foreigners have erroneously reported in their journals. The Hektans believed that the true from of the shapeshifting god Brahamaputra was a dragon with thirty-three bull's heads, and as such, no-one would dare lay a finger on a bull or a cow without first being quite sure of its status as a murderer, blasphemer, and/or larcener. The Sarovar Cow had been accused of the sin of murder. Now, five months after its summary acquittal, the two-headed cow is an installation in its new home temple. Newborn babes are blessed by a lick on each cheek (once for each tongue); weddings are held in its benevolent, lowing, symbolic presence; and petty criminals are dragged by its yoke, begging and pleading for forgiveness as people toss various vegetables and fruit at the guilty in various states of rot. One morning, as a bread thief was being sized for a manacle and a blindfold, the temple attendants discovered the Sarovar Cow ambling into the street. It ambled clear to the farms before anyone thought to stop it, and by then, there was a clear consensus in the crowd trailing behind it that it must be “going somewhere”. Yes, it wasn’t just wandering off. They were quite confident it was definitely going straight to somewhere, and nobody had the heart or immensity to stop it. It ambled past the farmland and out into the wilder roads at the edge of the Hektan territories. As the road turned into a monk-blazed trail out in the sticks, a following of hundreds still remained, still faithful that they were being lead to a place they now called: Sarovar. ---- “What am I looking at?” A city official said from his desk, staring past a Cult Registration Form at the new boy that had just handed it to him. “It’s a registration form,” the junior said. “For a new cult. The, um…” He wiped his brow with a handkerchief, dredging the sweat from the base of his horns. The official rolled his eyes at him, then at the form. It was half-validated, everything checked out all the way down to ‘Location of Temple’. “Sarovar?” he muttered. “See attached…?” There was another paper clipped to the back. He flipped to it. It was a map scratched in… hopefully charcoal. A black path began at a point depicting the ziggurats of Hektaraj, continued northwest along some folksy landmarks, terminating in an ‘X’ marked ‘Sarovar’. get! The Sarovar Cow moves to the new province. It now provides a +4 to Culture rolls in its province, but it may be trickier to move now. You also have a new cult on your hands. ---- As Pradeep gets back into the swing of things, the repercussions of the Orange Monks are everywhere. Many of the paperstone coins had been recovered, but it was impossible to account for all of them. There were rumors of cult sympathizers, but it was too early to tell. At the very least, people seemed to respect her more than usual, and people from the bottom to the top of the government started to come out the woodwork, unable to deny a vested interest in deep sea travel. Under her supervision, the fleet expands. research progresses, slowly. ziggurats are full of spirits (200/200). The excess escape, wandering to the places all spirits wander to. }} Category:History of Al'jann